Sometimes in life, if you are really blessed and God smiles upon you, certain events have the power to divide your whole life into 2 parts; before event X and after event X.
September 6, 2009 was one of such days for me.
6 years ago today, as Nigeria played a 2-all draw with Tunisia, I was uploading Gistcaster Alpha (Alpha refers to a software project at initial testing stage, it could still be unstable and full of errors and so the Alpha tag warns of all that). At that time, I had no clue about just how much my life was about to change. The Gistcaster project changed my life forever, it made me mature fast, forcing me to leave childish things behind.
Starting a project as a young person – perhaps even as a teenager – is one of the fastest ways to mature. Suddenly, you are dealing with “grownup” stuff and since business is business, whether you are 13 or 21 or 35, there are barely any difference in the laws to give you a smoother ride.
It is true that Gistcaster failed; over and over! But I think Gistcaster’s true success story is me, Gistcaster created me, gave me a reason to stay alive, toughen up, skill up and get out of my shell. Gistcaster made me rise to the game.
Reading books could not have done that for me, attending seminars could not have done that for me and sitting around some mentor all day could not have done that for me. Only the hands-on thrill of building something did that for me. By the time Gistcaster went under and I wanted to move on, I simply hit a “gusher” of ideas. All the years spent hacking out Gistcaster had developed serious capacity inside me, I had zoomed through my late teen years and early 20s at the speed of light, slowing down to enter life’s normal lane became impossible.
This is why September 6 is a very important date to me. It feels like a second birthday to me, the day I started something serious with my life (even though it did not look like that at that time).
It is only in retrospect and deep reflective thinking that we realise how much projects we embark upon change us, provided we pour in our hearts into it and follow wherever it leads.
